by Violet Duke
After ruffling Kylie’s hair and double-thumping Tanner’s back once more, Caine headed on back to the small lot behind the diner where he knew Addison parked that historic parade float she called a van.
He checked out all the possible points of entrance and weaknesses in the area, and though she’d probably beat him with a bat if she ever found out, he planted one of Max’s top-of-the-line tracking devices under the back bumper of her van. He couldn’t possibly get anything like this officially approved by his captain for a stalking case, but even if he could, he’d still pick a Spencer security gadget over anything department issued. There was a reason why Max and Gabe would undoubtedly become a huge success if they ever went through with the security business they wanted to start up.
With that taken care of, he went back in the diner to go kiss the hell out of Addison before he headed out on patrol.
Truth be told, he was a bit surprised that it was nearly eleven at night when he got the call from dispatch he’d both been expecting, and dreading.
An indignant and belligerent David was back at the diner demanding to see Addison. According to the intel they were getting, he wasn’t armed, but he was waving around the restraining order paperwork in utter disbelief.
Hell and damnation, the crazy ones always made him ten times more wary. Their instability was without a doubt, the most dangerous weapon in their possession.
Joe, Shirley, two cooks, and apparently three other kitchen workers—double their normal staffing numbers—had all been there to keep David from being able to see, let alone speak to Addison.
By the time Caine got on site, David was long gone. He took off before the officers could get there to arrest him.
And so had Addison.
After making sure Marco was getting the statements they needed to keep building a rock solid case against the ticking time bomb, Caine went back to his car to turn on his tracking device.
Within minutes, he tracked her van to Lakeview Ridge, but not anywhere near her Aunt Bernadette’s address. He found the van parked in one of the obscured temporary loading zone stalls at the south end of the country club grounds, just behind the golf clubhouse.
Caine approached the van cautiously, and shined his flashlight into the window, to reveal and empty driver’s seat.
Maybe she had the same worries you did about the van. The idea of Addison ditching the very conspicuous van made him nearly break out into a cold sweat. He had no way of tracking her if that was the case.
Just then, the thick curtain separating the front seats from the rest of the van flickered with movement.
Caine circled the van and hovered his trigger hand over his sidearm. “Addison? It’s Caine. Come on out, honey.”
Silence.
A horrifying, sickening mental image hit him all at once. What if David already found her. What it he had her in there. What if she was hurt…or worse.
He rapped his flashlight on the side door. “Addison, sweetheart. I need to know you’re safe in there. Because I’m imagining the worst right now. If you don’t open the door in the next five seconds, I’m breaking in.”
Mentally, he started the countdown while he ran through all the scenarios of what else might be going on.
God, what if the van was wired for explosives. The guy was crazy, but was he that crazy?
At the four-second mark, the door opened slowly.
Caine froze in shock over what he saw.
“Tanner? Kylie? What’s going on?”
The kids were sitting huddled in the middle of an air mattress laying atop the flattened rows of seats in the rear of the van.
He peered inside to make sure David wasn’t in there with them.
“Are you kids okay?”
Tanner stared at him in silence, bravery painted all over his young face, even as his eyes looked seconds from filling with tears.
“Addison went to the bathroom,” said Kylie quietly, eyes fixed on his hand as he finally moved it away from his sidearm. “This is the one we go to if the cleaners are still in the diner when one of us has to go real bad.”
Caine felt a pain hit him square in the solar plexus over that info.
...Which quickly shot up to his heart when he heard the soft gasp from behind him. Pivoting, he made sure to lower his flashlight so as not to blind her.
“Caine.”
He studied Addison’s scared, exhausted features and tempered the cocktail of overwrought emotions coursing through his veins as best he could. Even as every protective, possessive cell in his body was silently raging against whoever or whatever was responsible for every painfully beautiful decorative element he’d surveyed inside the van...each detail clearly Addison’s way of making her two siblings as loving a home as she could manage.
Caine pinned her to the spot with a deadly serious look. “We’re not waiting until my shift is over anymore. Tell me everything, Addison. Right now.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
ADDISON NODDED, but before she got right to the spilling-her-guts part, she motioned the kids back in bed. “We need to drive somewhere else first. Can’t park anywhere on this property after eleven unless you’re registered as an overnight guest. The security here is really tight.”
Caine frowned at her. “What do you mean? Then how do you and the kids normally sleep here?”
“We don’t. I park in the lot behind Joe’s diner every night. The only times I come here normally is from eight to twelve every morning during the weekdays when I go to my part time day job as a senior citizen companion for Bernadette Blumenthal, the eighty-year old grandmother of seven who everyone from her doctors to her dog groomer call Aunt Bernadette, at her insistence.”
She shut the van doors and then did a slow double take then. “Wait a minute, come to think of it, how did you find us here?” They were nowhere near the residential buildings on site.
For the first time that night, Caine lost a little bit of the ultra-intense, always-on-the-job Swat Team Ken Doll veneer.
…And became the even-more-intense, effing-screw-the-job Caveman Caine in the blink of an eye.
“I put one of Max’s security devices on your van earlier today.”
“You lo-jacked me?”
Both his hands flattened against the back of the van, on either side of her face. “Yep.” That single gruff, matter-of-fact word was charged with a thousand kilowatts of undiluted alpha male energy.
Why wasn’t she more upset about this?
Oh right, because he was doing that orbiting her to near-orgasm with just his eyes thing. Lord have mercy. That blistering hot look was exponentially more effective when he was in uniform.
His gaze locked on her eyes as he slowly slid two calloused fingers down the side of her neck until it rested gently on the thrumming pulse point near her throat. “Then where, pray tell,” he growled, in a voice as rough and shimmery as coarse silk, “did you park last night after I followed you here?”
Rather than answer, she closed her hand around his wrist. “That won’t work on me. You won’t be able to gauge if I’m lying by checking my heartrate.”
One brow raised up slightly. “No?”
She shook her head. “No. Because around you, my heartrate basically goes haywire anyway.”
His eyelids slammed shut as if he were praying for patience. When they opened again a few long moments later, to reveal a burning hunger that scorched her to the core, sure enough, her heart began beating triple time in her chest. “See?” she said weakly.
He took in a deep, frayed breath, then slid his hand into her hair to lightly cup the back of her head. “Answer my question, Addison.”
Wow, good move. Way more proactive than the pulse point thing. Because holy hell, there was no way in the world she was able lie to him now.
“I drove around here for about an hour just in case David had followed me, and then I exited out of the east entrance that goes right to the freeway. I made sure no one was behind me for several miles before I got off the free
way and went over to the most secure twenty-four hour parking garage I could find.”
He stared at her long and hard before he moved to open the van door back up again. “Pack everything up. And I mean everything. I’ll go talk to security to give us some extra time.”
Addison felt her throat start to close up in fear. Even more fear than she’d felt last night. “Y-you’re taking the kids from me?”
It was every nightmare she’d had for the past twenty-two months juggernauted into one wrecking ball shattering her heart into a thousand jagged pieces.
Her stomach dropped to the ground and her legs all but gave out from under her.
His gaze snapped back to hers in shock and gripped her arm to steady her when her stance faltered. “What? No. Of course not. You three are coming to my place as soon as my shift is done in a half hour. You’re never ever sleeping in this thing again,” he growled the latter sentence like a violent vow. “Get everything into my car. Don’t leave anything behind; we’re going to leave the van in the underground parking lot at the station.”
Though his expression remained unreadable, his voice gentled as he cupped Addison’s face. “I just need to get some paperwork in so I’m the primary on your case, then we can finish talking at my apartment after my shift.” His gaze was firm, resolute. Filled with a thousand reasons to trust him. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you and the kids. I promise you that. You believe me, right?”
She did.
…Despite what history had taught her over the years on this very subject.
“Kids, let’s get everything packed up,” she said by way of answer, which finally prompted Kylie and Tanner to heed Caine’s orders. She knew them, they would’ve darn well sat there like stubborn lumps on a log otherwise.
And that fact was the reason why her unprecedented trust in Caine came with something just as surprising.
Hope.
She had hope. In Caine. In the universe not being a complete asshole for a change.
Because she didn’t want Kylie and Tanner to have to live in a reality where the one and only person they felt they could trust was her.
Caine, being Caine, went back to his squad car without another word, somehow knowing that she needed both time and space to work through her feelings as she packed up the only place she’d ever really considered home. The place she’d made for the kids so they could have a home for once as well. It may not have been much, but it had been theirs. And it had been filled with more love and happy memories than all their years at their mom’s apartment, combined.
“We could run,” whispered Tanner when Caine was out of earshot. “That guy…he’s falling for you. I know he is. So I don’t think he’ll turn us in. If you want us to run, we’ll run.”
Hot tears flooded her eyes. Partly because of his thoughts on Caine’s feelings about her—which her heart had squeezed tight over hearing—but mostly because of his unnecessarily brave declaration. “No. No running.”
“Are you sure?”
No she wasn’t. Not even a little bit.
So she lied. “Absolutely. I think we should give Caine’s way a chance.”
But because she’d never been good at lying to the kids, even when it was for their own good, she added one truth she knew to the marrow of her bones: “Besides, if we ran, I guarantee you, Caine would chase us. And he for darn certain wouldn’t stop until he found us again.”
Strangely, that one wholly overbearing, yet unnervingly heart-filling fact gave her exactly the amount of strength she needed to finish packing.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AFTER EMPTYING OUT THE VAN, Addison followed Caine to the underground police parking lot below the station and pulled in to the stall he pointed out to her.
Over the half hour it took for him to return the squad car and do whatever cops do to close out their shift, all Addison could do was wonder.
Wonder if she was ready to face what was going to happen next.
Wonder how Caine was handling not doing the normal cop thing right now by calling social services to take the kids away.
Wonder why she wasn’t freaking out more.
Only the answer to the last was readily available.
She trusted him, a hundred percent.
The question now was if she was doing wrong by him in dragging him into her crazy life.
Caine returned just as her thoughts were spinning her off into directions she wasn’t prepared to face.
Silently, Addison carried the now dozing Kylie in her arms while Tanner carried his and Kylie’s backpacks. The ones Addison had always told them to keep their most treasured things in just in case they ran into an emergency situation.
She knew for a fact that the emergency backpacks now housed one very well-cared-for Venus Flytrap and a pressed flower arrangement she’d helped Kylie make out of the hyacinths that Caine had given her before taking them to the movies.
The fact that the kids had deployed her emergency protocol as they’d followed Caine’s orders hammered yet another set of splintered cracks into her heart.
He walked them over to his personal vehicle—a protypical cop SUV, big and black with dark bodyguard window tint—and saw that he’d already transferred the things from the van.
He drove in total silence until they got out of the police building. The farther they got from the station, it seemed, the less tense Caine became. Until finally, he asked quietly, “Do you guys need to stop at the store or anything? I don’t actually know what your normal routine is.”
Her heart seized in her chest, but in a good way this time. “We’ve got everything we need. I always keep some extra fruits and pantry items in our cooler so the kids can eat that for breakfast.”
“I’ll cook you guys breakfast,” he growled.
Honestly, at this rate, her heart would burst out of her chest before they even arrived at his apartment.
They were back to silence for the rest of the ride.
With one big difference.
Caine had reached over for her hand, almost as if simply reassuring himself she was there at first, but when she laced her fingers with his, he gripped it then as if he never meant to let her go.
Yep, the man was definitely out to slingshot her heart right out of her ribcage.
About five minutes later, Caine was unlocking the door to a cozy apartment that was nothing like she expected. Sure, it was a standard bachelor pad in that there was hardly any furniture. But the warm, oversized pieces he did have weren’t really a match for the modern condo apartment in the city. Rather, they were more designed for a big family home in the country
He even had photos of his family at one end of his kitchen counter.
When he saw her eyes gravitate there, he shrugged. “I should probably hang those up somewhere better; never had the chance.”
But he’d made the time to put them out where he’d see them every day. And that revealed more than he probably realized.
It didn’t take them long to bring in all the things they’d brought with them from the van. They were just finishing up tucking away the suitcase the kids shared when she noticed that Kylie and Tanner were standing stock still in front of Caine’s big flat screen, staring at it like it held the secret entrance to Narnia.
Caine, being Caine, just got that jaw-clenched look of intense, silently ferocious empathy that he made sure to wipe from his face before he handed Tanner the remote. “It’s going to take me a bit to get your air mattress filled up—I’ve got to find my air compressor—so why don’t you and Kylie watch some TV in the meantime.”
Addison felt an arrow of embarrassment then. “You don’t have to fill up our air mattress. We’ll be fine out here on the ground with our blankets and pillows.”
He gave her a look that shouted, hell no, even as he replied to her suggestion in a deceptively calm voice, “You three take my bedroom. I figured I’d set up the air mattress for Tanner, and you and Kylie can take my bed. I’ll sleep out here on the futon mattr
ess.”
While Addison was ready with an immediate vocal hell no, Tanner and Kylie beat her to the punch. Only they insisted on staying outside for a whole different reason. Courtesy of the big, bright TV they were now flipping channels through like a speed demon.
“We’ll stay out here!” they both called out in unison.
Tanner spared a quick glance at the futon sofa before his eyes riveted right back on the TV. “You said futon mattress. Does that sofa open up flat?”
Caine flipped it flat in one easy motion. “Yep.”
Kylie and Tanner didn’t even tear their eyes away from the TV as they grabbed their pillows and blankets from Addison’s hands before racing back to the now flattened futon.
After they were all settled in, Kylie then turned her doe eyes to Caine and asked in her sweet little voice, “Can me and Tanner sleep out here? And watch some TV for a little bit? Pleeeease.”
Tanner wasn’t even bothering to enter into the negotiations—Kylie had it knocked out of the park the second she’d clasped her hands together and audibly held her breath.
Addison smothered back a chuckle when she saw Caine melt right there on the spot.
Then Addison was the one holding her hands together over her chest—one atop the other, in hopes of slowing down her galloping heartbeat—as she watched the amazing man turn silently to the hall closet, and then return with two more fluffy spare pillows for the kids and a giant, white cloud-like comforter.
“It’s late so you guys can watch TV for an hour,” he said gruffly. “There are some kids’ channels that still have cartoons on right now. Then you sleep. When you wake up in the morning, you guys can watch more TV until you need to get ready for school. Deal?”
Kylie launched herself off the sofa and into Caine’s arms before she smattered his face with kisses. “Thank you, Caine!”
Tanner gave Caine the cool kid chin-jut thanks, though he did stare at the soft pillows Caine had handed them for a very telling second.
Meanwhile, Addison felt like she was going to lose it, just a little bit. Okay, maybe a lot. Her siblings hardly ever asked her for anything. And it absolutely slayed her that they were looking so over the moon by the possibility of something as small as watching TV.
